WhizBang! Labs, a Provo-based technology company, will cease its operations and lay off all employees, beginning next week.
Robert Sherwin, WhizBang! chief executive officer, confirmed Friday the company will release most of its employees on Monday. WhizBang! employed about 40 people in Utah and about 30 more outside the state, mostly at the company's Pennsylvania research lab.
In addition, the company employed more than 35 part-time interns, most of whom were in the Pittsburgh area, Sherwin said.
As of Friday, it was unclear exactly how many employees will be laid off on Monday — some would stay on to help customers with the transition, Sherwin said. But he estimated the remaining transition team likely will not exceed a dozen.
WhizBang! specialized in information extraction software — technology that used advanced machine learning techniques to search, classify and extract information from an unlimited number of Web sites or original source documents.
"We have a great company and great technology, but we have not been able to find the profitable business model that works. What we sell is very powerful, but it's also very expensive. And those are the budgets that have been cut — the capital expenditures," Sherwin said.
"It's a big blow. We've been trying to avoid it. We have had several rounds of layoffs, downsized the company and taken other cost-cutting measures. We thought until very recently that we'd still be able to sell the product. But it has become clear now that it's just too risky. So we want to protect the assets we have now. We want to make sure that people get paid and that they have severance packages."
The company on Friday was still contacting customers to inform them of the shutdown, Sherwin said.
WhizBang! was founded in 1999 by Sherwin, Berkeley Geddes and Dallan Quass. The company made a splash a year later with its commercial online job recruiting Web site, FlipDog.com, which had been named one of the Top 100 sites by PC Magazine.
FlipDog used WhizBang! technology to "crawl" through the Web looking for job postings, rather than charging companies to post available jobs.
Launched in 2000, FlipDog became the fifth-most-trafficked Internet site dedicated to online recruiting. WhizBang! sold FlipDog a year ago to TMP Worldwide, the owner of online job site Monster.com.
The company in December announced an alliance with LexisNexis, to serve the users of the LexisNexis Advertising Red Books and Directory of Corporate Affiliations.
Sherwin said that although WhizBang! will be no more, he hoped the technology behind it will continue.
"I will be working with some financial advisers to sell the intellectual property, the software that we've developed," he said.
"We continue to believe that it's very valuable. We're going to try to find homes for the product, and also the talent that we have — to sell the software and provide opportunities for our people to go to work."
E-mail: jnii@desnews.com